artist's license

[mattybock]

I remember seeing the old looney tunes shorts when I was little and some other cartoons of the same type. They all had a 'hillbilly' episode to their name.
In these hillbilly themed cartoon the characters mostly had a similar gun. You know what I'm talking about. Flintlock, crude and with a big bell shaped muzzle.
I'm wondering exactly were this came from.

The iron used to make the old guns was super soft, you could cut it with a draw knife in some cases. And it seems logical to me that during the reaming and rifling process that soft iron would bloom out a bit toward the end of the barrel.
This is the taper that many of us know in high-end swamped barrels. I think they're pretty neat looking.

Maybe one barrel that some newspaper man saw one day in the way back had an especially pronounced taper and he put it in his work.
I don't really know.
This is a wild guess, but I'd like to know if anybody here actually knows the origin of the stereotypical hillbilly gun. Do anybody know of any newspaper clippings or such that perhaps started the road to exaggeration?

 

[1911nutjob]

Oh my, the last time I saw one of those episodes you weren't born yet-makes me feel old. Anyhoo, I believe what you speak of is an exaggeration of the blunderbuss, what most consider to be the predecessor of the shotgun as we know it from the 19th century to present. The three stooges were great for the same portrayal. If you haven't heard of it, there's lots to be learned via google/yahoo. Never fired one myself, but I would think that the flared muzzle would be conducive to pouring in the powder and shot. As I mostly shoot percussion sixguns and ol' slabsides, someone with more knowledge will surely come along and educate both of us. The hillbilly names of course are spoofs of the famous Hatfield and Mccoy feud-hot right now with the recent history channel program.

 

[Rifleman1776]

I think yer title sez it all. The flared muzzle is odd enough it makes good cartoon stuff.

 

[Elnathan]

You will see the same bell-muzzle in the illustrations for Walter D. Edmond's 1941 book The Matchlock Gun, where it is seriously intended to represent an early 17th century matchlock musket, and in the Disney film Beauty and the Beast, where it is used humorously to represent a generic muzzleloader (the clothing in the film is vaguely 18th century). It is a fairly commonplace "old gun" stereotype used over the last century or by people who have no clue what a muzzleloader looks like, and isn't always meant to be funny. It is based on a blunderbuss, greatly exaggerated.

 

[Zonie]

As a kid going to my folks church's Bible School I spent a lot of time studying the drawing on the rooms wall.
At the time, that picture was more interesting than the begats and other teachings they were talking about.

It depicted the Pilgrims standing on the shore of Plymouth Bay and one of them was holding a flintlock blunderbuss with a huge muzzle.
Being a Bible School in a church that dates back to the days of the Pilgrims, I thought, it must be right.

It was years later that I found that they wouldn't have a blunderbuss and their guns couldn't be flintlocks. The flintlock wasn't invented until about 100 years later.

 

Matty - with all due respect to your inquisitive mind, I cannot believe you would ask the members about a gun you saw in a cartoon. Are you also curious as to why people in old cartoons only have three fingers and a thumb? Do you think that's real too? :wink:

 

[cynthialee]

I kinda thought he had a cool question.
The meme started somewhere.

 

[ChrisPer]

Yes, it IS a cool question and I want to know more.

I remember seeing real blunderbusses in Petersen's "The Great Guns" which I bought (or was given) almost 40 years ago. I recall those trumpet-mouthed things depicted for the Mayflower pilgrims about 1970 too. But I bet there is more to learn about it. The meme is just SO quirky and unrelated to the actual blunderbus.

I bet it was via the old Sunday Funnies... where the artists were free to draw any old manure as long as it made you laugh.